Five Apps for EAP Students

Until very recently, there have been very few apps specifically designed to help students studying English for Academic Purposes (EAP). But that seems to be changing – not by a great deal I hasten to add – but you are beginning to see the odd one or two appearing and there are also a few apps that are for general university study skills but could easily be adapted by EAP students. Below, I outline 5 that you might want to recommend to your students:

Acceleread (ipad and iphone)

A real challenge for EAP students is increasing reading speed so they can work through articles at the same speed as native speaker students. Unfortunately, while most native speaker students can read at about 350 words per minute (wpm), most non-native students only manage around 200 wpm, so they need to develop the skills to read quicker. Acceleread is an iphone/ipad app that provides a full course in speed reading, the app is free to download but the free version is more limited and the full version gives you additional features such as the ability to upload your own epub books to read. The ipad version costs £5.49 and the iphone one is £2.99.

I’ve been using the full version myself to develop my own reading speed and it really does help you through the process with a series of reading tasks and exercises. Below is a short video review I created going over some of the key features:

It’s a shame they don’t make a version for Android, but there are alternatives on that platform, the best one I’ve found so far is Speed Reading. Again, it is free to download but to get extra content and exercises you need to upgrade to the premium version which costs a couple of pounds.

Academic Writing in English (ipad/iphone and Android)

As far as I know, this is the only dedicated app available for EAP students. On the plus side, it’s free and has plenty of content on many aspects of academic writing, including exercises. It’s also cross-platform, so available for both ipad/iphone and Android users. However, the layout and UI are poor, it seems like this is just a series of webpages condensed down for a mobile screen and it shows with a lot of dense text and small buttons to press. If you haven’t got great eyesight, this could be a real strain. Still, difficult NOT to recommend it when it’s free. Here’s a short video highlighting some of its features.

Terminology 3 (ipad/iphone)

There are hundreds of dictionary/reference apps out there for students, some free, some incredibly expensive and it’s difficult to know which ones to recommend to students. I’ve often recommended the dictionary.com or Free Dictionary apps or as they are free and can be used offline, but the layout of the entries is a little confusing so it might not be possible for students to easily find the information they need.

Recently though I discovered Terminology 3. The best way to describe it would be as a meta dictionary as it allows you to access a lot of other free online dictionaries (Oxford, Longman, Wordnik etc) through its interface. It isn’t free, but it only costs a couple of pounds and the interface is really simple and clean. The video below gives an overview:

Mendeley (ipad/iphone)

Mendeley is a incredible free cloud service for academic students letting them store, highlight and annotate PDF articles on either desktop or mobile. It’s also a reference manager so you can easily import/export references into other programmes such as Microsoft Word. The ipad/iphone app is free as well and while it is more limited than the desktop programme, you can read your PDF articles and highlight/annotate them. This will then sync up with your library so any annotations will carry across to other devices. Students can also organise their articles into suitable folders. Here is a short overview video:

The mobile version is not as slick as it could be, if you want a more refined app to handle your Mendeley articles, Papership is probably a better option, but do note that you can’t make notes on articles and sync them up with your Mendeley library unless you pay for an upgrade.

Android doesn’t have an official Mendeley app yet, but they can use an alternative called Scholarley. This can download PDFs from your library, but you can’t annotate/highlight on them.

Movenote (ipad/iphone and Android)

This is a really handy little app or desktop tool that allows students to upload Powerpoint slides, images or PDF documents and then record themselves using the device’s camera delivering a presentation. For EAP students, this is incredibly useful as it gives them a chance to practice and rehearse giving spoken presentations. Once they’ve recorded themselves, they can share the recording as a link with their tutor/classmates and there is the option for the viewer to make comments on the recording that are then emailed to the owner.

It’s easier to record yourself using the desktop app, but it is possible on Android phones and the ipad/iphone. For some reason they seem to prefer pictures rather than powerpoint slides, so students might want to convert slides into jpegs before adding them. Also, you have to pay for the ipad/iphone app (£1.99) but on Android it’s free.

I would be interested to hear from any other EAP teachers who have used apps with their students and which ones they’ve found to be most useful

About David Read

I work at the English Language Teaching Centre at the University of Sheffield as the Director of TEL (technology-enhanced learning). I've been an EFL/EAP teacher and teacher trainer for over 20 years and have worked in 14 different countries. Settling down is clearly an issue for me.